Stories of merger talks between Microsoft and Yahoo have won headlines galore over the past 10 days but broader combinations and other blends of business IT, consumer and media giants are likely to play an even larger role in reshaping the internet landscape.
Immediately after the news broke of the Microsoft-Yahoo talks early this month, experts began floating the prospect of “Yacrosoft”, a putative new company that would see pooled web portal capabilities and advertising tools.
As the watchers noted, any deal could change the face of the internet in business-to-consumer terms but fewer commentators pointed out that it would also have a significant effect on the business-to-business sector, particularly on email, storage, calendaring and web site development.
Yahoo has the world’s most popular email client and a hugely popular photo
storage site in Flickr, for example, while Microsoft has recently been beefing
up its own services under the Live umbrella brand. Both have flirted with
offering business versions of these services so that firms can use applications
online, although many more business users employ the free services as informal
adjuncts to their firms’ in-house capabilities. A move to switch off one or the
other free email service
could cause significant consternation for millions of business users.
However, a Microsoft-Yahoo coming-together would probably not mean much
in terms of web-based productivity applications as neither has so far announced
an online equivalent of Google’s word processing, spreadsheet or forthcoming
presentations programs.
Microsoft said it is “policy in these situations not to comment on rumour and speculation”.
At the same time as Microsoft and Yahoo were reportedly discussing combination possibilities, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. attempted to buy US publisher Dow Jones and reports linked various prospective buyers, including Google, with news syndication agency Reuters.
Reports suggested that News Corp. would beef up Dow Jones’s web presence
while some said Google could become a media powerhouse. However, the ill-fated
combination of Time Warner and AOL from 2000 could persuade these firms that
content and media giants do not necessarily fit together.
But even without acquisitions, the business web is changing fast, thanks to the cross-fertilisation of business and consumer software capabilities.
IBM is already in on the trend having early this year previewed Lotus Connections, a MySpace-like way to make knowledge management more accessible by letting users flag areas of interest and expertise.
Other software veterans such as Microsoft and SAP have begun adding Web
2.0 elements such as wikis and blogs to programs while startups such as
SuccessFactors are attempting to put a more attractive face on back-office
applications and yet others, such as Corizon, are specialising in offering
composite enterprise application “mash-ups”.
Some experts contend that this route could offer a way out of the usability issues that have long plagued business apps.
“The new technology out there is allowing people to connect far more easily and the best way to do this is through social media tools,” said Stephen Dale of social-networking consulting firm Semantix, in a recent interview with IT Week.
It is clear that even as it matures, the web and business are still getting to know each other. More strange bedfellows are likely to combine in all sorts of odd ways as the action heats up.
